TERM=xterm lacking smcup and rmcup (alternate screen)

[Christian Weisgerber]

Sebastian Gniazdowski:

> I want to criticize an approach taken in FreeBSD regarding the
> alternate screen. It's not available in newcons. One person wrote
> that's because Tekken doesn't have such feature, and newcons
> implements Tekken.
> 
> That's maybe fine. However, newcons doesn't have it's own termcap. It
> uses TERM=xterm, which normally has rmcup and smcup. Some smart person

te/ti in termcap(5) language.  rmcup/smcup is the same in terminfo(5).

> thus decided to remove those codes from TERM=xterm. You see what this
> leads to? No alternate screen on X11.

That's not what happened.  The ti/te capabilities for switching to
the alternate screen were expressly removed from the "xterm" entry
in revision 200503, because a vocal group of developers disliked
the alternate screen feature and insisted that it should be disabled
in xterm.

https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/share/termcap/termcap#rev200503

-- 
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber                          naddy at mips.inka.de